Covid has left Sir Leonard Blavatnik as Britain’s richest man. Should we mind?
Len Blavatnik (c) at the Blavatnik School of Government 2016. (PA)
It is a poor pandemic that does nobody any good — and Covid is no exception. Sir Leonard Blavatnik, whose global business empire includes Warner Music, has increased his wealth by £7.2 billion, or nearly a third, in the last year. His net worth is now estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List at £23 billion.
This staggering fortune makes Sir Leonard Britain’s richest individual — a status he already achieved in 2015. He is also among our largest philanthropists, having donated large sums to many cultural institutions such as the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery. Tate Modern now has a new wing, the Blavatnik Building, and the V&A has named its entrance hall after him. So far, at least, none of these august institutions has had occasion to look Blavatnik’s gift horse in the mouth.
Sir Leonard’s largest donation, of £75 million, was given to the University of Oxford to found the Blavatnik School of Government — one of the biggest benefactions in the university’s history. The Blavatnik School, housed in a striking new Herzog & de Meuron building in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, is intended to enable Oxford to compete with older American establishments, such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Nor has he neglected Harvard, home of the Kennedy School. It one of his two American almae matres, the other being Columbia University in New York City. The Blavatnik Family Foundation, his main philanthropic vehicle, recently gave Harvard Medical School $200 million to foster, among other things, biotech startups with subsidised lab space. This, too, has been a rapidly growing field in recent times as a result of global health concerns.
Should we admire those who have become wealthier during the pandemic — or resent them? No doubt the Left will demand that the Government should penalise those who have done well — even if they have also done good. We can be sure that Boris Johnson will ignore such voices. It would be madness to impose a windfall tax in the case of Sir Len, who devotes a considerable proportion of his profits to philanthropy. There is no reason why he should continue to fund educational and cultural activities in the UK if he does not feel appreciated here. His knighthood is a token of that appreciation, but it is important to donors of this magnitude that they do not feel taken for granted. Rather than seeking to claw back the profits that he has legimately made during the pandemic, it might be better to examine his career and draw some lessons from it. Who is Britain’s richest man?
Sir Leonard Blavatnik was born in 1957 in Odessa, the beautiful Black Sea port that is now in Ukraine but then belonged to the Soviet Union. His family were Jewish and this fact had a decisive impact on his life. Like thousands of other Soviet Jews, the Blavatniks wished to emigrate, but for years they were refused and their children denied higher education. Such Jews were known as refuseniks. In 1978, having been forced to interrupt his studies at Moscow State University of Railway Engineering because of his parents’ request to emigrate, Leonid Valentinovich Blavatnik and his family were permitted to leave. They settled in the United States, but he later acquired joint UK-US citizenship.
Leonard Blavatnik, as he was now known, set up his core business, Access Industries, through which he still controls his conglomerate, already in 1986 before he was thirty. He was quick to invest in privatised businesses after the fall of the Soviet Union. With a Moscow university friend, Viktor Vekselberg, he formed the Renova investment vehicle, then joined forces with Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group to form AAR. Blavatnik acquired a wide portfolio of industrial investments there, ranging from oil and petrochemicals to coal and aluminium. The Yeltsin era saw the spectacular rise of the Russian “oligarchs”, but under Putin their activities were curtailed by the Kremlin. AAR’s joint venture with BP ended in acrimony; in 2013 the state oil company Rosneft bought out BP and AAR for $28 billion in a deal that was signed off at a meeting with Putin. Unlike Vekselberg and Fridman, who remained in Russia, Blavatnik ensured that his empire was firmly based in London and New York. His philanthropic donations have attracted some criticism — not least from a former dissident, the late Vladimir Bukovsky — but no concrete allegations have been made against him. If there were any solid evidence that Blavatnik’s fortune had not been honestly acquired, it is unlikely that he would have been made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in 2013 and then, four years later, knighted by the Queen for services to philanthropy.
An almost certainly apocryphal remark attributed to Bismarck is: “Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.” The same applies to money. In the case of Sir Leonard Blavatnik, however, we can at least say that he has used his money to improve the lives of the rest of humanity. Having been a refusenik once in his life, he is determined that no doors will ever be closed to him again. Here in Britain we should be glad of his discreet generosity. He is a reticent figure who keeps a low profile; hence Blavatnik is hardly a household name — yet. Sir Leonard deserves our gratitude nonetheless.
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